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Think Tank

Parlophone; 2003/2012

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Choose Damon. Choose Graham. Choose Damien Hirst's cheekily agit-pop country house or Sophie Muller's teen-spirit-stinking squat. Go pop, then spend a decade slowly deflating; study the songbook so you can tear it up with precision. Choose irony, choose sincerity. Choose your own worst NME: a Gallagher, any Gallagher, or maybe just yourself ("Do you feel like a chain store? Practically floored?"). Choose fame, or flee from it fast as you can in a milkman's suit. Choose Ray Davies, choose Stephen Malkmus; choose la-la-la or wooo-hoo. (And before you answer this next one know that the Queen is watching.) Choose Britain. Choose America.

Or, you know, don't choose. Blur have been a band for 21 years, and their story is long enough to speak a bunch of contradictions. That's what happens to bands that house four egos and a pair of dueling geniuses. They rarely move in straight lines. One example of many: Blur arrived in New York for the first time on the day Nevermind was released. When asked on radio what they thought of the new Seattle sound, Graham Coxon said, "I fucking hate it." Later he'd be the one to lead the band toward a post-grunge, indie-tinged sound, a nugget of which will be blared alongside "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at sports arenas until the end of time. Another? In 1994, Damon Albarn wrote a snide little number about the cultural allure of the West (sneeringly: "La-la-la-la-la/ He'd like to live in Magic America/ With all the magic people"). Three years on, he was a bit more forgiving (one more time, with earnestness: "Look inside America/ She's alright/ She's alright"). It's not despite but because of these pivots and complexities that it feels appropriate to call Blur a defining band of the past two decades.

Up until now, listeners have been urged to take one of two positions: 1) "Great pop band, until they went to America and sold out!"; or 2) "The early stuff is too British, but I love all that weird shit they did later on." There was a sense that you couldn't love it all-- the witty, theatrical, Kinks-inspired character sketches perfected on 1994's Parklifeand the impressionistic elegies of their 1999 sad-bastard masterstroke, 13. And the choice was loaded. Think I'm exaggerating? Just read some of the reviews of their last two greatest-hits collections, 2000's Best of Blur and 2009's Midlife, both of which favored their later stuff. "Let Blur bash their way on towards the margins," Steve Sutherland wrote defensively in a 2000 issue of NME. "Just because these [early] songs embarrassed them once they started listening to broadsheet critics and retreated wounded from the big-sales battle with Oasis doesn't mean that we're morons to love them." Nine years later, Scott Plagenhoef observed on this site, "Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur." Midlife, he said, "can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States."

Three years after Midlife-- and with the whole world turned to their second reunion at the London Olympics closing ceremony-- it's time for a truce. So here it is, Blur 21, the inevitable box set comprising all seven albums, three DVDs, and five-and-a-half hours' worth of rarities. And even if you can't afford the thing on vinyl, its very existence presents us with the perfect opportunity to rethink the band's history. Because for its breadth and complexity, the box actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

Be patient, though, because we're going to start at the beginning, and their 1991 debut, Leisure, is not very good. It shows a melodic gift and hints at the Syd Barrett obsession that would plant seeds for future experimentation ("Sing"). But mostly, it's the work of a band still searching for its identity. Prior to signing with the London label Food Ltd., Blur were known as Seymour, a madcap art-punk four-piece that generated a mild buzz in late-80s London with their boozy, chaotic live shows. That anarchic energy is all but absent from Leisure, though it's captured on the box's first disc of rarities, including early Seymour demos and a 7" containing the endearingly awkward baby picture "Superman".

When Leisure came out, baggy was all the rage in the UK. The label's intention was to turn Blur into the next Stone Roses-- or better yet, the even better-selling Food signees Jesus Jones. They wanted Blur's first single to be the baggy-by-numbers "I Know" but, in the first of many well documented band-vs.-label throw-downs, the band fought for the shoegazey "She's So High". Blur won, and 21 years later, this art-over-commerce victory feels prophetic, even if the song doesn't. "High" is still a better track than "I Know", but it has a kind of time-stamped anonymity that pervades even the best moments of Leisure: pretty, vacant, and vague.

1992 would light a fire under Blur, kindled by a few factors: a bad management contract that left them in significant debt; critical and commercial disappointment; intra-band conflict (a flame that never stopped burning); and, above all, grunge. Blur toured North America for the second time that year. And just a year into the post-Nevermind world, flannel, disaffectedly mumbled lyrics, and buzzsaw guitars were the new normal. "Nothing in England counted and that really pissed us off," Albarn recalled in 1999. "So we decided to make a record as English as possible; a record full of English references and English cultural icons." Therein lies the irony of their breakthrough 1993 album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. Though it wouldn't hit big in America, it was conceived with the same spirit of roguish overthrow as Nevermind itself. Albarn's newfound articulateness was, actually, an act of punk rebellion, a sneering rejection of the status quo.

The artistic leap between Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish is roughly the same size as the one between Pablo Honey and The Bends: unpredictably huge. It's a statement record in title, sound, and content. What else can be said of an album that begins with a once-upon-a-time as dramatic as, "He's a 20th-century boy..." and draws upon an lineage of English guitar pop ranging from the Kinks to the Who to T. Rex? Blur would improve on these ideas on their next few records, but Modern Life remains a finely observed, tartly disillusioned snapshot of post-Thatcher Britain, buoyed by exquisite pop hooks. "Colin Zeal" and "Chemical World" also mark Albarn's first forays into the character study songs he'd later become known for. Into theater since his teens, Albarn would occasionally let drop in interviews that his greatest influences were Brecht, Weill, and Artaud's "theater of cruelty." Modern Life began to fulfill that promise: Blur were suddenly a band of ideas, though none so pompous that it weighed down the immediacy of their music.

Parklife is the masterpiece of this era. Pop-art bright, stingingly funny, and at times suddenly poignant, it remains the defining artifact of Britpop. It's a nationalistic record in the same way Born in the USA is a nationalistic record: It might look like sloganeering patriotism if viewed from outer space, but up close it's a finely detailed, intricately cracked document of a very particular national malaise. The disco smirk "Girls & Boys" (propelled by one of Alex James' best basslines) finds its hedonistic vacationers "avoiding all work, 'cause there's none available," while the tragicomic "Tracy Jacks" sketches a lonely civil servant who goes quietly mad. With humor, pathos, and nostalgia, Parklife tells of a modern world where dreams have been boxed in by materialism, conformity and routine, and even the once-space-age future has lost its sparkle. "End of the century," Albarn shrugs over Coxon's minor chords. "It's nothing special."

The millions-selling, Brit-Award-sweeping Parklife was also the record that made Blur into bona fide pop stars, a role that some members embraced more readily than others. "I made a point of drinking two bottles of champagne a day for 18 months," is how bassist Alex James remembers 1994. "England only imports something like 100,000 bottles a year, so I reckon I drank 1% of England's total champagne import." At that point Coxon was, arguably, drinking even more, but without the joie de vivre; instead, he was increasingly uncomfortable with the band's success. The Great Escape, the improbably strong 1995 effort they churned out amidst the squeals of Parklife mania, is fittingly a record of baroque excess (lots of brass) and tension. It's Blur's poppiest album, but it's puffed within an inch of bursting: "Stereotypes", "Charmless Man", and "Entertain Me" are all deceptively dark, stretched like a smile pulled eerily tight. Escape's crown jewel is the brilliant, Pulp-like single "The Universal", an exploration of anhedonia, a state of mind the band knew intimately at this point. Coxon retreated further, and for a moment it looked like he'd leave the band. What happened, though, was just the opposite. He steered them toward their biggest re-invention yet.

"Death of a Party" (which now sounds like the first proto-Gorillaz Blur song) is the most apt song title on 1997's Blur. Recorded partially in self-imposed exile in Iceland, it is a post-success record, what happens when the odd burdens of mega-fame don't destroy a band but instead sends it diving into uncharted waters. It is 1995's hangover. Exquisitely bleary-eyed ("I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", the oddball sprawl of "Essex Dogs") and often jolting ("M.O.R.", "Chinese Bombs"), Blur sounds like staying up for six days and then accidentally catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. And somehow, amidst the claims of career suicide, it was a huge international hit, the one that finally broke them in the States. (Which is to say that yes, this is the "Song 2" album.)

Blur found Pavement in the mid 90s the way Dylan found Jesus in the late 70s: The transfiguration was that complete, that apparent, that difficult for longtime fans to swallow. Coxon had long been evangelizing American indie rock to his bandmates, and, wearied of fame and looking for a new direction, they finally started to listen. To call Blur Coxon's record is a huge simplification (it also marks the height of Albarn's Bowie phase), but it does contain the first song that Coxon wrote and sang on a Blur record, the sweetly wooly "You're So Great". Much has been made of the Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. influence on his virtuosic playing, but Coxon has said that the record he was listening to most while making Blur was Big Star's elegiac Third/Sister Lovers. Alex Chilton was an artistic kindred spirit for Coxon. Both had experienced intense, Tiger Beat-cover-style adoration (Chilton had a No. 1 song with the Box Tops before he was 18) and had figured out early on that commercial success wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Chilton, of course, lost his foil too early when Chris Bell left Big Star and died in a car crash not long after. The tension that kept Blur going, in a creatively fertile, decade-long state of about-to-combust, was the push and pull between Coxon and Albarn.

"Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to," says drummer Dave Rowntree in the box's liner notes, "But you can't do that in a band with Damon." 13, their second masterpiece, finds Albarn and Coxon's opposing sensibilities bleeding into each other like a muddy watercolor. Both were hurting. Coxon was depressed and still at odds with the rest of the band, and Albarn's long relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann had just ended. A coping method he'd picked up from blues and DIY alike, Coxon knew how to translate personal pathos into Blur's music. Both the Blur songs on which he sings lead, "You're So Great" and 13's "Coffee and TV", are candidly about his drinking, and on 13, he guided Albarn toward confessional songwriting, too. Albarn had always used character songs to express emotion, but his songs on 13 strip away the protective covering of wit. "I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep," he croaks on the gorgeous closing lament "No Distance Left to Run", while the wounded pop-spiritual "Tender" is an obvious career highlight. William Orbit's brilliant, painstaking production pushes Albarn's ever-present pop sensibility to the brink of dissolve. The Third/Sister Lovers comparison feels more apt here: 13 is a record in a sustained state of elegant unravel, full of the unexpectedly beautiful sounds that pop songs (and people) make while they're falling apart.

As time goes on, 13 sounds more like a definitive statement, and 2003's Think Tank sounds more like a post-script. Recorded in Morocco after the first Gorillaz record and Coxon's departure (he plays on just one track, the gloomy "Battery in Your Leg"), it may be the only Blur record that suffers in retrospect. There are some great tracks ("Out of Time" and "Sweet Song") but it doesn't quite pack the punch it did a decade ago. On the other hand, the newest track in the box, the archly grand "Under the Westway", feels like a return to form, which is to say it finds the band sounding like it hasn't quite sounded before. In the liner notes, James points to something true, recalling the Think Tank tour: "It took at least four people to replace what [Coxon] does. Two backing singers, another guitarist, and a lead guitarist. And a percussionist." Now that the band is-- tentatively, feebly, and contemptuously as ever-- back together, it's even more clear that Blur is the alchemy between these four people.

Like any box set worthy of attention, the sprawl of rarities offers some illuminating gems (an early demo of "Beetlebum"; the underrated oddball 1992 single "Popscene"), plenty of cheeky throwaways (a Seymour-era cover of "Maggie May"; an orchestral pop snippet called "Sir Elton John's Cock"), and, of course, omissions for never-satisfied diehards to whine about (mine include the original, Leisure-era recording of "1992" and the mid-tempo demo of "Song 2"). The box also contains DVDs of two complete live performances, which tell two very different tales. The first is a show at Alexandra Palace in North London from October 1994. Blur are at the height of their first wave of fame, and the young audience is whipped into such a frenzy that they even sing along with the melody of the instrumental filler "Lot 105", as if they just need something to scream; the band gets off on it. Five years later, they are at Wembley Arena playing all 20 of their singles in chronological order. They look as weary as second-term presidents as they slog through the motions for the first three-quarters of the setlist, but at "Tender" everything shifts. Suddenly, they embody the material, coming achingly alive again, reborn on the stage.

If you need a through-line, try the story that those selected bookends tell: Blur are a triumph of feeling. They spent the first half of their career creating modern characters who'd become fashionably distanced from their own emotions and the next half actually, unfashionably, emoting. But that's just one straight line you could draw; why should you have to choose? Modern life is full of champagne and hangovers. So is Blur.